8 Quotes by Cory Taylor

Our default position was silence, but not of the harmonious kind. Silence for us was a form of accusation, an expression of mutual disappointment and rage, a substitute for violence.

When you’re dying, even your unhappiest memories can induce a sort of fondness, as if delight is not confined to the good times, but is woven through your days like a skein of gold thread.

So many times I've wondered what might have happened to me if I had lost my legs, or even just my right one, where my first melanoma appeared two or three years later. If I'd been a second slower stepping away from the car, I might not be dying now. I'd be legless, of course, but still in good health. Of these fateful forks in the road our lives are made up. We are all just a millimetre away from death, all of the time, if only we knew it.

I wonder, for instance, if our laws reflect some deep aversion amongst medical professionals here towards the idea of relinquishing control of the dying process into the hands of the patient. I wonder if this aversion might stem from a more general belief in the medical profession that death represents a form of failure.

And yet one cannot face death without reflecting on questions of religious faith, or the lack of it, and on matters of morality, or its absence. For instance, I wonder whether doctors here are discouraged from talking about death with their patients by the strictly scientific and secular nature of the way our medicine is taught and practiced.

We have lost our common rituals and our common language for dying, and must either improvise, or fall back on traditions about which we feel deeply ambivalent. I am talking especially about people like me, who have no religious faith.

As we are enabled to live longer, we are also condemned to die longer.

But I will not miss dying. It is by far the hardest thing I have ever done, and I will be glad when it’s over.